Development of a whole-feeding and automatic rice thresher for single plant

Threshing is an essential pretreatment in rice yield-related traits evaluation and rice thresher is an important study of agricultural machinery automation. However, traditional threshers aim at threshing filled grains with simple function, which are inapplicable to high-precision and automatic yield-related traits evaluation of rice. And the conventional threshing method for the traits evaluation is still manual. To improve it, we developed a whole-feeding and automatic rice thresher for single plant. The thresher adopted a hierarchical multi-roller rolling method to thresh filled and unfilled grains respectively. A fish scale sieve plate was designed to separate the grains from the straw and the whole system was controlled by Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) automatically. To evaluate the threshing system, two batches of rice plants were tested, and the results showed that the thresher had the advantages of high precision, low breakage and no residue. Thus, the thresher provides strong support for high-precision and automatic yield-related traits evaluation of rice.